


just us, now

by thesemovingparts



Series: if we make it through december [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Crying During Sex, Exes to Lovers, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Porn with Feelings, Sort of? - Freeform, idk dude this won't make a ton of sense if you haven't read but at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 20:26:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28551588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesemovingparts/pseuds/thesemovingparts
Summary: But next time Peter heard her breath hitch, it sounded less like arousal and more like a sob, so he pulled back and looked up at her face-- lips twisted up and jaw tight but eyes carrying more longing than MJ usually let herself get away with.“Em,” he squeezed her thigh gently, in a way he hoped was even remotely soothing. “If it’s too much--”“It’s not,” she assured him with a shake of her head and a deep, steadying breath. “It’s… It’s a lot, but not too much. I promise.”*OR: the off-screen, post-funeral sex scene from but, at least that one (1) person asked for.
Relationships: (discussed) - Relationship, Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Series: if we make it through december [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2065605
Comments: 10
Kudos: 47





	just us, now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seekrest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekrest/gifts).



> HAPPY (almost, I got impatient) BIRTHDAY SEEK! I am crazy grateful for you, here is a gremlin scene to show my gratitude. 
> 
> If you read [but, at least](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26125726) and wondered "hmm. I wonder why prem didn't include the sex scene." it's because this is it and it's 5k and would've fucked the pacing of that fic so entirely but here we are many months later! 
> 
> (FYI yes this is part of a [series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2065605) and will probably feel weird out of context/ not make much sense)
> 
> happy 2021 to you all <3
> 
> love,  
> prem

In the time it took to walk from Betty’s apartment to MJ’s, the wind got colder and the alcohol-induced warmth started to fade from Peter’s cheeks. 

A particularly fierce gust ran straight through them, lifting the end of MJ’s scarf and tousling her hair around her face as she hunched her shoulders up closer to her ears, and without thinking about it, Peter let go of her hand so he could wrap an arm around her, pull her closer to his side and, ideally, share a little bit of his body heat with her. 

MJ leaned further into him, and Peter had already known that they were on the same page, but it was nice to have that little extra sliver of proof that she was relying on his presence as much as he was relying on hers. 

Because their day had sucked. 

It had really, truly, taken it out of them, even with clandestine trips to lock themselves in public restrooms and sit on a bench by the subway platform for fifteen minutes after they’d arrived before walking the rest of the way to the restaurant after the service. 

No number of little escapes could erase the fact that they had attended Ned Leeds’ funeral earlier that morning, and no number of lazily-mixed whiskey cokes in plastic cups could overpower the heaviness of their emotional exhaustion. So they kept leaning into each other, and Peter kissed MJ’s temple as they waited for a crosswalk light to turn green, and he didn’t let go of her until they were stood outside her building and she had to dig through her purse for her keys. 

“You should get a keychain,” he said, inconsequential as he studied the lines of her face, the flush of her cheeks, the tiredness there but the quiet amusement when she shook her head at him. 

“I have a keychain,” she said, head still hunched and hands still digging. 

“Better keychain, then,” Peter shrugged, propping himself up against the doorframe with one shoulder. 

The security light above them was burnt out, so only half of MJ’s face was lit by the streetlamp a few yards away when she let out a heavy breath and her frown deepened. 

“Fuck,” she muttered, lowering herself to her knees and beginning to actually pull handfuls of junk out of her purse. 

Chapstick and old receipts and about a half a dozen pens and a funeral program featuring a photograph of Ned’s face, carefully folded into quadrants and gently handed off to Peter as he crouched down beside her instead of being strewn on the concrete steps like the rest of it. 

He held it, careful as MJ finally extricated her ring of keys from the bottom of her bag. He ran his thumbs across the already-worn paper as she unlocked the door and propped it open with her foot. 

He handed it back numbly, neither of them managing to make eye contact as she tucked it back into the front pocket of her purse and zipped it shut. 

“Are you coming up?” she asked, forcibly dragging his gaze away from her hands as she opened the door wider. 

Peter thought about going back to May’s, about his room at the Tower with their made beds and stash of comfortable pajamas. But he also thought about laying by himself atop his mattress, too sober to be that alone on a night like this, and he nodded. 

“I… If you’ll have me,” he said, but before he’d even gotten the entire sentence out, MJ had his hand in hers again and was tugging him through the open door, letting it swing heavily shut behind them. 

She didn’t let go of him as they climbed the stairs, and Peter was grateful for this, because with every passing moment he was finding it more and more difficult to push back his desire to touch her, hold her, be close to her. 

MJ’s hand slid up to his bicep as she unlocked the door to her apartment with her free hand, and, in one graceful motion, pushed open the door with her shoulder turned around, and pulled him into a kiss all as she stepped backwards across the threshold. 

So they were kissing as they entered and they were kissing as he kicked the door shut behind him and they were kissing, kissing, kissing as they stepped into a silent agreement not to leave their little bubble for the rest of the night. 

“You’re sure about this?” Peter asked through heavy breaths as MJ helped him out of his coat and scarf and hat. 

She pressed a long kiss against the apple of his cheek and Peter’s heart settled into a steady and familiar rhythm. 

“Yeah,” MJ breathed into his skin before pulling far enough away to look him in the eye. “You?”

“Yeah,” he replied, nodding even as he felt his awe for her paint itself in heavy strokes across his face. “Yeah, God, of course.” 

MJ grinned into it when she kissed him again, and it was slower, more intentional with every shift of her body against his. Peter used what little dexterity he was able to retain while so fully absorbed in her orbit to unbutton her coat and help her slide it down her arms, letting it fall to the floor beside them. 

“Come on,” she pecked him on the lips one more time before turning and moving across the small studio apartment towards the nook where her bed was tucked away. 

Peter followed her, would’ve followed her straight off a cliff, as she pulled off her knit cap and tossed it to the side, running a hand through her curls and shaking them out of their flattened state as well as she could. 

He sat down on the edge of her mattress and watched as she worked her feet out of her boots, offering her a hand to help her balance as the left one became stubborn and required a slightly more aggressive tug before she could toss it aside and move close to stand between his legs. 

“You’re still single, right?” she asked, as she ran her hands up his chest, his shoulders, his neck to cup his face in her hands. 

“Yeah, Em,” he laughed softly, kissing the palm of her hand and pulling her body flush against his. 

“You’re not still seeing that guy from your study group?” she smirked at him. 

“I slept with him, like, twice,” Peter scoffed. “That doesn’t count as seeing someone.”

“I mean,” she traced one of his eyebrows with the tip of her index finger. “You made a very big deal out of it when you told me.”

“I’m super allowed to make a big deal out of the first guy I ever slept with,” Peter ran his thumbs over her hip bones, beneath her sweater but over the waistband of her pants. 

What he didn’t mention was that he was allowed to make a big deal out of the first non-Michelle Jones he had ever slept with, because he didn’t need to. Because MJ already knew that, because she knew everything, because she had called him when she slept with someone that wasn’t Peter for the first time too. 

It might have been a weird thing to do if it hadn’t felt like the only thing to do. 

“But you, like, got tested after not seeing this dude?” she quirked an eyebrow at him. 

“Clean as a whistle.”

“Alright then,” she tipped his face up. “You gonna kiss me or not, Parker?”

“I--”

She cut off what was going to be an indignant exclamation about how _she_ had been the one stalling and he was just trying to keep up with her-- always, always, always just trying to keep up with her, by kissing him hard without any room for misunderstanding her intentions. 

Standing there with his hands on her waist and his knees on either side of her hips, craning her neck to kiss him full and loud and breathtaking, MJ pulled a contented sigh from his lips as she ran her fingers through his hair, scratching gently across his scalp. 

MJ pulled away to kiss his cheek, his jaw, right below his ear as Peter pulled her closer by her waist. 

“What do you want?” she breathed as she pressed her hips forward against his growing erection. “I wanna give you anything you want.”

“I just--” Peter’s lungs took a catch-step and he let his hands slip up under the hem of her shirt, trail across the soft skin of her waist. “I just want the both of us to feel good, and-- I know-- I _know_ it might be fucked up to want you so badly on tonight of all nights, and it might be wrong, and it might be-- fucking fucked, but I-- I just want us--”

“Pete,” she cut him off, hands on his cheeks tipping his head up so he was forced to look her in the eye. There was something glistening there, past the ache and the want, something a lot like understanding, he realized. “I want that too,” MJ said. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he agreed shakily, letting his forehead fall forward and burying his nose against her sternum. 

“Because-- because there were only three of us who…” she was speaking into the curls on the top of his head now, holding him close against her as if she was afraid he might disappear. “Who knew.”

“I know,” Peter murmured, because he did, because she was right that no one else in the world would ever understand the collective life that the three of them had lived-- the growing, the falling, the fights for their lives that they won and lost and won again. 

No one, not even the Avengers, not even Tony Stark himself, would properly understand what it was like to take ahold of your best friends’ hands and stand tall in the face of utter destruction in the form of senior prom and the end of the world with equal fervor. 

“It’s just us, now,” MJ continued quietly, a kiss to his temple that had him looking back up at her. “It’s just us,” a kiss to his cheek. “And no one else will ever get this either.”

She meant what was between them, she meant the loss they were actively suffering, she meant the way it felt when she pressed her mouth up against his mouth and her hips up against his hips. 

Her fingers stumbled over the buttons of his shirt-- the shirt that he had been wearing with a tie earlier in the day, the shirt of which he’d rolled up the sleeves the moment it didn’t feel completely inappropriate because it may have just been a regular white button-down but he was suffocating in it. 

Peter knew, as MJ managed to push it off of his shoulders and down his arms, that he would never be able to put it on again. 

He quickly realized the way his breathing came easier once it was off, however, and immediately bunched up the hem of MJ’s black sweater, hands trailing up her sides, all the way up into her armpits at which point she did the rest of the work and pulled it up over her head, dropping it unceremoniously at her feet. 

In her black bra, dress pants, and gold necklace with a tiny, spiked mace pendant hanging between her breasts that Peter hadn’t even realized she had worn that day, MJ was otherworldly and the only thing keeping his feet on the ground all at the same time. 

He and Ned had both pitched in to buy her that necklace, the first birthday she had after their little adventure in Europe, and Peter leaned forward to kiss her right above where it hung, one hand cupping around the wire of her bra and thumb smoothing across her nipple. 

Peter could feel her breathe deeply, her hand on the back of his head holding him close. 

“Peter…” she sighed, pressing her hips up against what was officially a full-blown erection once more. 

“I wanna eat you out,” he responded as his lips trailed across the tops of her breasts, one hand moving around to her back where he could fiddle with the clasp of her bra. “Is that okay?” 

“Yeah, I-- Yeah,” she floundered, hint of a laugh in her voice as Peter took her by her waist and repositioned their bodies so she was laid out across the mattress and he was above her, kneeled between her legs. 

He couldn’t fix it, he couldn’t make this better for any of them, but he could remind her that she had him. Michelle Jones had him, always and forever, no matter what happened, no matter if they ever actually got their act together in any sort of romantic way, if this was a return to something lost or something brand new or a final goodbye to this part of their relationship, she would always have _him._ Peter Parker. In whatever way she wanted. 

Peter helped her get her dress pants off and she unclipped her own bra and opened her legs for him without question, resting back on the pillows up against her headboard. He kissed her knee, unable to take his eyes off of the necklace hanging between her breasts, or the hands that she was using to tweak her own nipples as he slowly but surely moved higher up her inner thigh.

Kiss, suck, bite, and a moment to watch the way her chest heaved, the way her pupils were blown out as she looked down at him between her legs-- it was all turning him on an unbelievable amount, and he simply had to dive in before he actually exploded right then and there. 

Peter palmed at his own erection briefly, just to stave off pure insanity as he found her clit at the end of a long swipe of his tongue and sucked. 

“Holy shit,” MJ exhaled as she moved one of her hands to push his hair off his forehead. Peter hummed up against her, out of agreement, out of eagerness, out of gratitude.

As he continued, one arm wrapped around the underside of her thigh and tongue working in practiced motion, Peter closed his eyes. 

He closed his eyes, and he tuned into the sound of her heartbeat, the sound of her stuttering breath, the sound of her nails, gentle against his scalp every time he hit her at just the right angle. 

It was good and she was good and he was just focusing on that-- on her feeling good and letting her make him feel good in the process. 

But the next time Peter heard her breath hitch, it sounded less like arousal and more like a sob, so he pulled back and looked up at her face-- lips twisted up and jaw tight but eyes carrying more longing than MJ usually let herself get away with. 

“Em,” he squeezed her thigh gently, in a way he hoped was even remotely soothing. “If it’s too much--”

“It’s not,” she assured him with a shake of her head and a deep, steadying breath. “It’s… It’s a lot, but not too much. I promise.” 

“Okay,” Peter nodded, but he moved up her body nonetheless, pressing open-mouthed kisses in his wake-- to her hips, her stomach, her ribs and breasts and shoulders. Because he knew they needed a beat, the both of them, to find their footing and breathe through the overwhelming slew of _feeling_ in the room, in their chests, in a world without. “Okay,” he breathed as he kissed her slow and replaced his tongue on her clit with his fingers. 

There were tears mingling on their cheeks as MJ laced her fingers through his curls and hitched her leg up to give him easier access where he was sliding in two fingers and curling up against the spot he knew made her--

“ _Peter.”_

\-- made her say his name like _that._

Thumb on her clit and mouth on her nipple while her hands still tugged at his hair and God-- _God,_ was he enamored with the feeling of her up against him, the softness of her skin, the quick thump of her heart, the clench of her thighs around his hips that made him instinctively rut his cock-- still trapped beneath underwear and pants-- up against her. 

If he wasn’t careful he was going to come in his boxers and he wasn’t, quite frankly, being all that careful. Because he was overwhelmed too, and he was feeling all of it all at once and he was watching MJ’s face as she tipped closer and closer towards the edge and he hadn’t ever realized how he could feel so full and empty all at the same time. 

“I’m-- fuck,” MJ gasped. “Just-- here--”

She slid her hand down and grabbed ahold of his wrist, pulling his fingers out from inside of her and using them to rub at her clit with more direct attention. 

“Good?” Peter asked, lips up against her neck as she planted a foot on the mattress and bucked up against his hand. 

“Yeah,” her grip on his hair slipped a touch past painful and Peter didn’t give a single shit. “So-- So--”

MJ cut herself off as she came, open-mouthed and riding it out against Peter’s hand for a long beat before collapsing with heavy breaths and releasing her grip on him. He kissed her cheek before rolling off of her, propped up on his elbow so he could look down at her face-- tear stained and relaxed with dark, damp eyelashes fanned out across her cheeks, mess of curls tangled on the pillow beneath her. 

“You make me feel insane sometimes,” Peter murmured, free hand trailing fingers up and down her side as she caught her breath. 

“You _are_ insane,” she replied without opening her eyes. 

“Yeah,” Peter said with a breath of a laugh. “But when you do it, it’s in a good way.” 

He watched as she threaded her fingers through the hand at her waist, cracking her eyes open to look at him with an emotion he didn’t have the capacity to try and name. MJ hadn’t worn makeup on that day, so her skin was clear to display flushed cheeks and bright eyes rimmed in red.

She ran a thumb over his knuckles, and he could see the moment that a glint of an idea lit up her eyes. 

“I think it’s time you took your pants off,” she said, already sitting up, not even coming off the high of orgasm yet as she started to unbuckle his belt. He could tell, not just because he could hear the way her heart was still pounding, but because he knew her tells. 

Michell Jones, queen of the poker face, and he knew her tells. 

“Yeah, I was wondering when we were gonna get to that part,” he deadpanned as he lifted his hips to push down his pants. 

MJ lifted a brow at him. “You know, I was gonna suck you off, but not if you’re gonna be that guy.” 

“What guy?” he chose to play into it instead of commenting on the way she wiped stray tears from her cheeks, tears that he had dried from his own face while she had still been catching her breath. 

“The guy that-- you know, _that_ guy,” she floundered, talking with her hunching shoulders as she unceremoniously tugged off his underwear and dropped it beside her on the mattress. 

“Eloquent,” Peter grinned at her as she kneeled between his knees. “Really, you just have such a way with-- _words--”_

He gaped as she took him in hand and licked once with the broad length of her tongue across his tip. 

MJ smirked up at him, resting her cheek against his thigh as she began to slowly stroke his cock-- up and down and up to tease across the tip again with a careful swipe of her thumb. 

“Okay?” she asked, equal parts sincere and teasing. 

Peter’s eyes couldn’t decide between looking at her face-- beautiful and tired and haloed by half-flattened curls-- or her lithe hand working his dick, so his gaze flitted between the two sights and their varied degrees of _filthy_ for a moment as his heart rate accelerated. 

“Oh-- Okay,” he conceded, watching as she took his agreement as encouragement to wrap her lips around his tip and swirl her tongue in a way that made him drop back into the pillows with a huff of breath. “ _Okay.”_

He looked down at her bobbing head, her hand around the base of his shaft, for as long as he could manage before even just the _looking_ was threatening to discredit any claims to stamina he had made over the course of their relationship. 

Peter pushed her hair out of her face with an unsteady hand, finally squeezing his eyes shut when she opened hers and met his gaze head-on. 

“Em-- This is--” he groaned as she did something particularly indescribable with her tongue. “If you want anything else outta me you gotta stop that now.” 

MJ pulled off and wiped the spit and precum off her chin with the back of her hand, stopped her stroking but kept her grip where it was. 

“What else can I have out of you?” she asked, earnest in the tilt of her head, the brightness of her dark eyes. 

Peter had the sudden urge to give his heart away, to crack open his chest and claw past muscle and tendon to grab ahold of it, to cut it off from veins and arteries and drop it on the bed between them like a cat bringing home a dead mouse. 

Because it wants to help you, wants to sustain you, wants to give you this one thing they have to offer. Because it loves you. 

“Whatever you want,” he said instead, air between them buzzing with something different than just pure arousal, something bigger. 

They were both breathing unsteadily as they forced a break in eye-contact, as MJ crawled over him to snatch a condom out of the box in the bottom drawer of her bedside table. 

“Here,” he took it from her before she could do the work of putting it on for him and tore the package open with his teeth. 

“I want to ride you,” she suggested simply as she straddled his thighs and sat down. 

Peter’s hands fumbled as he rolled on the condom, but he cleared his throat and nodded and felt his face burn red at the way he knew she was smirking at him. 

“Yeah, uh, yeah,” he agreed with a waver to his voice that had nothing to do with any sort of trepidation and everything to do with the fact that MJ had her hands on his shoulders and was lifting herself up over him on her knees. “God, you’re beautiful,” he breathed, as though from his mind but from someone else’s mouth. 

“You too,” she said up against the apple of his cheek with a soft kiss, even as she grasped him in her hand and directed him succinctly towards her entrance. 

Sitting up as he was and with MJ in his lap, Peter was able to circle his arms all the way around her waist and hold her nearly flush against his chest, bite down gently on her shoulder as she sunk slowly down his length with a quiet--

“God, _Pete.”_

“Fucking perfect,” he choked into her skin in response while she sat there, bottomed out and adjusting to the feel of him inside her which hadn’t happened in many numerous months while they’d been studying in different states. 

And then MJ started to move-- slowly up and slowly back down at first, and then quicker-- and it got somehow even _more_ fucking perfect. 

The first time that Peter and MJ had had sex, they had been eighteen years old and mere months away from graduating high school and moving to different colleges and deciding to give long distance a shot because how could they not? How could they ever give up on this thing that they had? 

The first time they had sex, they stopped every five minutes to make sure everything was still okay, they fumbled at seeing each other naked, and they hadn’t figured out yet that they were allowed to joke and laugh and have fun with the gross weirdness of it all. 

The first time they had sex, it had felt life-changing and monumental and something just to the left of _great_ but they didn’t know what great sex really was yet, wouldn’t figure it out for a little while, not until they were both willing to say what they wanted when they wanted it. 

Now, two years later and a whole lot of talking and trying and make up and break up and _let’s just be friends but keep doing this_ sex later, every movement felt instinctual. Not in chasing down their own pleasure, but in a mutual grapple to make the other party feel as good as they possibly could, using all of the knowledge and all of the communication that had led up to that point to their advantage.

Peter could tell when MJ’s thighs started to get too tired for her to really be enjoying riding him, and he knew that when he flipped her over he would be able to find the right angle with a couple of strokes, and in turn MJ knew how to tighten her muscles around him just at the right moment and pull his hair while he was kissing her and run her nails up his back in just the right way to make him positively crazy. 

“Faster,” she asked of him, because she knew that she could and she knew that he would listen, and Peter relished in the way her jaw hung open, her eyes fell shut as he sped up and ran a thumb across her clit at the same time. “Yes, _yes,_ fuck.”

And as much as Peter had agreed that their time apart had been necessary, he was also relatively certain that this was the woman he would be caught up in for the rest of his life. At the moment, fucking her into the mattress hard and kissing her soft, he couldn’t be entirely sure what that meant, but there was no getting rid of this thing that they had-- this comfortable, overwhelming connection. 

Peter tried to kiss her, but ended up just panting into her neck as he started to lose control. Because it was just physical pleasure, it was just emotional intricacy, it was just Peter and MJ and the snow on the windowsill. 

Just them. Now. 

MJ told him in a mangled collection of half-formed words right before she came, chest heaving and inner muscles spasming and dragging Peter over the edge with her less than a full sixty seconds later. 

He was still inside of her as he let his body weight press into her, as their chests stuck together with sweat. 

A moment passed. And then another. The cold radiating off the glass of the nearby window being staved off by the heat echoing from their entangled limbs.

“You gonna stay there?” MJ asked, shoving gently at his shoulder. Peter just collapsed against her further, crushing her more fully into the mattress. “Okay,” she laughed quietly. 

“Shhh,” he hushed. “Sleeping.” 

“I’ll choose not to take that as a comment on my performance,” MJ deadpanned, but he could hear the tiredness in her voice, could hear it in his _own_ voice too if he was being honest with himself. 

Peter rolled off of her and landed in the open space beside her with a huff before tying off the condom and throwing it in the small bin beside her bed. He had barely finished with that task when MJ rolled onto her side and curled up against him, pulling the covers up over them with her as she did. 

“Hey,” he said, arm wrapping around her shoulders as she rested her head on his chest. “Good teamwork there, huh?” 

“Shhh,” her breath hissed against the cooling sweat on his chest. “Sleeping.” 

“Ah,” Peter couldn’t keep the faint amusement out of his quiet voice, couldn’t help but trail his fingers up and down her arm. “Hoisted by my own-- whatever the fuck.” 

“Petard.”

“What’s a petard , anyway?” 

MJ’s body was growing heavier against him, so Peter held her tighter. 

“Uh-- Shakespeare,” she murmured. “Like-- something to do with being-- fucking-- thrown by the blast of your own bomb or something.” 

“You gonna actually go to sleep now?” Peter kissed the top of her head and felt her press her face, nose first up against him. 

“I need to piss,” she grumbled into his chest, burrowing even further beneath the blankets as she did so. 

Peter exhaled an amused huff of breath through his nose, lifting his head to look down at where she had pillowed her head against him. 

“You gonna do that here?” he teased softly-- in both volume and tone. 

“If we were at your place I just might,” she responded, rolling away from him and out of bed with a groan. “God, I really don’t need anymore Peter Parker-induced UTI’s in my life.”

It might not have been entirely proper, but Peter couldn’t help but watch her as she wrapped her arms around herself against the cold and hurried fully naked across the apartment to the bathroom. 

“That only happened once!” he raised his voice just enough to call after her. 

“If you’d ever had one you’d know that’s plenty,” she replied through the open door of the bathroom, completely unself-conscious with the knowledge that he could hear her peeing. 

He wasn’t sure if that level of comfort came from having been a romantic item, or from not being one anymore, but sleepiness was finally beginning to mingle with the exhaustion he’d been feeling all week so he didn’t bother examining it further.

“Fair, I guess,” Peter said as the toilet flushed and the sink started running. 

MJ picked up a spare blanket from the couch on her way back to bed and draped it over them as she slid back under the covers beside him. 

Peter immediately gravitated towards her warmth, draping an arm across her waist and letting his face fall into the space just above her collar bone. In response, MJ wrapped an arm around his shoulders and placed a hand on the back of his head, ducking her face into his hair and holding him, keeping him. 

“I’m glad you’re here tonight,” she murmured quietly, almost bashfully now that the moment had shifted out of desperate and chasing and fast into something quieter, something a little more vulnerable for the both of them. 

“Me too,” Peter pressed a kiss to her neck. “Thank you. For-- for everything today.”

MJ chuckled softly, huff of breath tickling across the tops of his curls. 

“Are you thanking me for having sex with you?” she teased gently. 

Peter let out a startled laugh before propping his chin up enough to look at her face. 

“Sure,” he said glibly. “I mean, the other stuff too, but yeah.” 

Something in her smile softened in a way that was familiar but uncommon as she let her eyes float, down past his lips, to the point of his chin, and back up to meet his gaze once more. 

“Don’t sneak out in the morning,” she beseeched of him, quiet and nearly pleading. 

Peter kissed her on the lips, slow and easy and certain before he promised, “I won’t,” and settled back against her side. 

By the time Peter drifted off to sleep, warmth of the small fairy lights hanging above MJ’s bed filling the small space with a comfortable yellow glow, it was so late that it might as well have been early. But that didn’t matter, not to two people who had barely been sleeping anyway, not to two people who were glad just to have someone to spend the night with after such a long, long, endless day. 

There had been a moment, at the funeral, as Peter let May hold his hand and tried to convince her that he wasn’t disintegrating from the inside out, when he thought the day might genuinely never come to an end. That he would live out the rest of his days in that moment, with Ned’s name stuck just at the back of his tongue and a sharp pain pressing right between his eyes. 

But time had continued moving, albeit slowly, and Peter had made it to the end of the night. 

Soon the sun would be rising outside of MJ’s window, and under a mountain of blankets while sharing in mutual body heat, they would be able to claim survival of another day. 

_**End.** _

**Author's Note:**

> thank you all for stopping by, your comments are always appreciated <3


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